Nepenthe, Naphtha, Lethe, “with a likeness burst in the memory.” How’d that accumbrous cloud begin? In the raw morning, bit by all that dribbled through my hands, lost like money in the night (or, as Beckett puts it, in Murphy: “It is so easy to lose personal freshness”), I found myself perusing a 1971 issue of David Morice’s Gum, a tiny Iowa City thing (25¢), reading Darrell Gray’s “Nepenthe”:

The many senses like little open doorsInto one huge room full of colored fumes Speeding across the skyMy hand touches yoursYours mineA spine-tingling actualityBorn and raised on a pin-headIn the fraction of time it takes Gloom to glistenThe faucet to dripAs you enter the room and are seized By the information

And I try’d to remember how Frank O’Hara’s “Naphtha” went, certain that a connection exist’d between the two, composedly ignorant that “Naphtha” is not “Nepenthe,” &c. And all I recall’d: “Ah Jean Dubuffet” and something about doing military service in the Eiffel Tower, and Iroquois ironworkers and that lovely “with a likeness burst in the memory” line. (And then, in the Gray poem, I got distract’d into thinking whether or not “A spine-tingling actuality / Born and raised on a pin-head”—which incited its own pricklinesses of delight—might’ve been a “source” for the brief blast of “Actualists” in Iowa City and San Francisco, that groupuscular seizure young men (mostly) and old seem particularly “prone” to.) Where along the bicyclist’s swift trajectory did he begin to accustom himself to the sneaky-Pete apprehension of a mistake? Nepenthe is “the one that chases away sorrow” [ne = not, penthos = grief], particularly, one adds, thinking of poor Darrell Gray, in the form of “straight, no chaser.” And Naphtha, root of naphthalene, “moth balls,” and (according to the O.E.D.) “Liquid petroleum, particularly of a thin, volatile kind.” O’Hara: “there is a parable of speed / somewhere behind the Indians’ eyes.” (There is an O’Hara letter of 1 February 1961 to John Ashbery—who’s putting together a group of works possibly under the spell of Reverdy for an issue of Mercure de France—wherein O’Hara asks “Do you think Naphtha is sort of Reverdian?” And if one thinks of Reverdy’s speed, which is cubism’s speed, of shifting p.o.v., cinematically adroit, and sees how O’Hara fidgets with looks at “the gaited Iroquois on the girders / fierce and unflinching-footed / nude as they should be / slightly empty / like a Sonia Delaunay” and into the speed “behind the eyes” and telescoping back “out” to how “they invented the century with their horses / and their fragile backs / which are dark,” one thinks, yes, Reverdy. Is a Sonia Delaunay “slightly empty” because it is lacking the penile Tour Eiffel that husband Robert Delaunay characteristically insert’d into paintings? “Stop that.”) And, returning, Lethe’s simply a Greek tagalong bum steer, cross-fouling the “burst in memory,” that river in Hades where the water made one forget. Here’s the poem:

Naphtha

Ah Jean Dubuffetwhen you think of himdoing his military service in the Eiffel Toweras a meteorologistin 1922you know how wonderful the 20th Century can beand the gaited Iroquois on the girdersfierce and unflinching-footednude as they should beslightly emptylike a Sonia Delaunaythere is a parable of speedsomewhere behind the Indians’ eyesthey invented the century with their horsesand their fragile backswhich are dark

we owe a debt to the Iroquoisand to Duke Ellingtonfor playing in the buildings when they are builtwe don’t do much ourselvesbut fuck and thinkof the haunting Métroand the one who didn’t show up therewhile we were waiting to become part of our centuryjust as you can’t make a hat out of steeland still wear itwho wears hats anywayit is our tribe’s customto beguile

how are you feeling in ancient SeptemberI am feeling like a truck on a wet highwayhow can youyou were made in the image of godI was notI was made in the image of a sissy truck-driverand Jean Dubuffet painting his cows“with a likeness burst in the memory”apart from love (don’t say it)I am ashamed of my centuryfor being so entertainingbut I have to smile

Which deposits me back at the feet of Darrell Gray’s poem where the “room” is akin to the “century” in “Naphtha,” isn’t it? Again the sense of irrevocable speed, again the primordial acceptance of the actual: “you enter the room and are seized / By the information.”

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The daily Adorno. “The category of the new produced a conflict . . . a conflict between the new and duration. Artworks were always meant to endure; it is related to their concept, that of objectivation. Through duration art protests against death; the paradoxically transient eternity of artworks is the allegory of an eternity bare of semblance. Art is the semblance of what is beyond death’s reach. It is not only reactionary rancor that provokes horror over the fact that the longing for the new represses duration. The effort to create enduring masterpieces has been undermined. What has terminated tradition can hardly count on one in which it would be given a place.” The nonsensicalness of an avant-garde tradition. Is it in keeping with Adorno here, too, to declare that artworks of overweening and blatant ambition (the “monumental,” the imperturbably and self-satisfy’dly “grand”) by definition conflict with the primer of the new? (I admit it: I am thinking of the conscious grandiosity of my bête noire Ron Silliman’s The Alphabet, how it so evidently is playing for keeps, staking—les jeux sont faits—it all on something like Pound’s antiquated view of things, recall Pound’s image of the conservation of “great literature” under the dross of critical response “heaped up and conserved round about them in the proportion: one barrel of sawdust to each half-bunch of grapes.”) Somewhat later Adorno writes: “As soon as artworks make a fetish of their hope of duration, they begin to suffer from their sickness unto death: The veneer of inalienability that they draw over themselves at the same time suffocates them.” The answer (there is no answer): “the unsurpassable noblesse of fireworks . . . the only art that aspires not to duration but only to glow for an instant and fade away.”